7.21.2010

In 1949 Henry S. Levy & Sons, Inc., a family-owned kosher bakery in Brooklyn took on the services of Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), an agency destined to forge a creative revolution in advertising during the next two decades. Thanks to the print ads DDB created for the Levy's bakery, all of NY and the advertising world would know the "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's Rye Bread" slogan. Even though the bakery eventually went out of business, their ads had an enormous influence on other ad agencies' work and pop culture in general-like the use of contrasting ethnicities in the United Colors of Benetton ads that ran during the 1980s, one of these showed a Hasidic boy with his arm around an Arab friend. I definitely have a soft spot for these ads, and appreciate the DDB legacy.

7.20.2010

7.19.2010

Greendex: Consumer Choice and the Environment is a Worldwide Tracking Survey that measures consumer behavior in 65 areas including energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment/sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues. A total of 17,000 consumers from 17 countries were surveyed. Overall, environmentally friendly behavior among consumers in 10 out of 17 countries has increased over the past year. As in 2008, the top-scoring consumers of 2010 are in India, Brazil, China (in descending order). American consumers’ behavior still ranks as the least sustainable of all countries surveyed since 2008, followed by Canadian, French and British consumers. Consumers in emerging economies continue to round out the top tier of the Greendex ranking, while the 6th lowest scores were all earned by consumers in industrialized countries. Much of the increase in the overall scores was due to more sustainable behavior in the housing category (energy + resources consumed). Americans, Hungarians, British and Australians all had increases in this area. Cost considerations and environmental concerns both motivated consumers to adopt more sustainable behavior over the past year. When asked to what extent 10 different factors discourage them from doing more for the environment, most people said they do not do more because companies make false claims about the environmental impacts of their products. The 2nd reason was that further individual efforts are not worth it if governments and industries do not also take action. environment.nationalgeographic.com

Art International Radio is an internet radio station based in the Clocktower in lower Manhattan, a building famous for having been at the centre of NY’s art scene in the 1970s-80s. At the helm is Alanna Heiss, who’s been at the forefront of contemporary art in NYC for decades and was the founder of the awesome PS1, a centre for art in Queens that’s now part of the Museum of Modern Art. AIR broadcasts art-related talk and interviews as well as an eclectic range of music, and experiments with radio theatre and more ambitious sound-based extensions of art projects. Watch the Monocle piece HERE.